On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 10:28:49PM -0400, John Meeks wrote: > It seems to me that finding people to communicate with (trust) is the hard > part, and actually communicating with them is the easy part. The opennet > allows you to not have to trust people, since everything is anonymous, and > thus solves the hard problem (in addition to the easy one). The friends > network solves the easy problem (communication) but doesn't help with the > hard problem (finding people to trust).
No. The hard problem is providing something vaguely resembling the internet in scale and functionality that: a) Prevents the powerful from tracing a given information source - author, informant, whistleblower, artist, etc. AND b) Will still be usable even if running a freenet node is itself illegal, and will make it expensive to destroy the network. The opennet is for those who don't have any friends but trust the government. The darknet is for those who trust their friends but not the government. Take your pick, you can't have both. The opennet is harvestable, and always will be harvestable. Only the darknet has a chance in a hostile environment where running a node may in itself be dangerous. > > There is one change that I think would be good: Make it impossible to > construct any given file from any given node. This turns deniability into > impossibility (ie. someone can't say "the file was on the drive, and it > was encrypted" they can only say "part of the file was on the drive, but > we had to get the rest off the internet to get the file"). This seems to > have a better chance of standing up in court. In other words, never let a > given node hold any complete file. This is impossible unless the node knows which files belong to which splitfile. Which would be very bad. Well I suppose we could do some red/black colouring or something, but it would suck, and wouldn't work on a darknet. In any case, the real problem here is that the whole file might be in your store because you requested it (the Register attack). There are several possible solutions to this. The obvious darknet solution is just to not cache the files you request (unless somebody else asks for them). The problem is this might be detected by your immediate neighbours; unless we take fairly extreme measures, it is likely that your immediate friends can detect what you are browsing if they actively attack you with e.g. correlation attacks. All solutions to this so far appear rather difficult and expensive (slow), so we are just ignoring the problem for 0.7.0. > > --- John -- Matthew J Toseland - toad at amphibian.dyndns.org Freenet Project Official Codemonkey - http://freenetproject.org/ ICTHUS - Nothing is impossible. Our Boss says so. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/support/attachments/20050919/2f74db50/attachment.pgp>
